Snips NLU (Natural Language Understanding) is a Python library that allows to parse sentences written in natural language and extracts structured information.

Check out our blog post to get more details about why we built Snips NLU and how it works under the hood.

pip install snips-nlu

We currently have pre-built binaries (wheels) for snips-nlu and its dependencies for MacOS (10.11 and later), Linux x86_64 and Windows.

For any other architecture/os snips-nlu can be installed from the source distribution. To do so, Rust and setuptools_rust must be installed before running the pip install snips-nlu command.

Snips NLU relies on language resources that must be downloaded before the library can be used. You can fetch resources for a specific language by running the following command:

python -m snips_nlu download en

Or simply:

snips-nlu download en

Once the resources have been fetched, they can be loaded in Python using:

from snips_nlu import load_resources
load_resources("en")

The list of supported languages is available here.

Let’s take an example to illustrate the main purpose of this lib, and consider the following sentence:

"What will be the weather in paris at 9pm?"

Properly trained, the Snips NLU engine will be able to extract structured data such as:

{
 "intent": {
 "intentName": "searchWeatherForecast",
 "probability": 0.95
 },
 "slots": [
 {
 "value": "paris",
 "entity": "locality",
 "slotName": "forecast_locality"
 },
 {
 "value": {
 "kind": "InstantTime",
 "value": "2018年02月08日 20:00:00 +00:00"
 },
 "entity": "snips/datetime",
 "slotName": "forecast_start_datetime"
 }
 ]
}

Here is a sample code that you can run on your machine after having installed snips-nlu, fetched the english resources and downloaded this sample dataset:

from __future__ import unicode_literals, print_function
import io
import json
from snips_nlu import SnipsNLUEngine, load_resources
from snips_nlu.default_configs import CONFIG_EN
with io.open("sample_dataset.json") as f:
 sample_dataset = json.load(f)
load_resources("en")
nlu_engine = SnipsNLUEngine(config=CONFIG_EN)
nlu_engine.fit(sample_dataset)
text = "What will be the weather in San Francisco next week?"
parsing = nlu_engine.parse(text)
print(json.dumps(parsing, indent=2))

What it does is training an NLU engine on a sample weather dataset and parsing a weather query.

To find out how to use Snips NLU please refer to our documentation, it will provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to use and setup our library.

Please join our Discord channel to ask your questions and get feedback from the community.

• What is Snips about ?
• Snips NLU Open sourcing blog post
• Snips NLU Language Resources
• Bug tracker
• Snips NLU Rust: Rust inference pipeline implementation and bindings (C, Swift, Kotlin, Python)
• Rustling: Snips NLU builtin entities parser

Please see the Contribution Guidelines.

This library is provided by Snips as Open Source software. See LICENSE for more information.